Oracle Fusion Apps – Key Financial Features and More

AT OOW, Oracle’s VP of product strategy revealed 100 plus customers being in Fusion. Its a solid number for a product that’s still evolving to be global ready. Nonetheless, its amazing to hear ingenious strategies Oracle proposes to adapt Fusion Apps. Interestingly, an extensively publicized option is a co-existence strategy to help companies who wanted to bleed Fusion early. Even though the Fusion sessions portray 100+ customers in Fusion Apps and more to follow, talking to Fusion product directors provides further insight to the adaption strategies, which to wait for Fusion 11g Release 2. Finally Oracle is taking the stance to have Fusion built on 100% standards-based architecture by providing a customization and extension friendly landscape.

Fusion early adapters in co-existence strategy are predominantly on Human Capital Management(HCM). But the product group’s viewpoint is to have Performance Management module in Fusion and the rest in R12, which makes perfect sense. Especially, when Fusion is still transforming into full-blown production state. Even though the focus of this article is Financials, I just wanted say HCM’s Predictive Analytics is my favorite one. It is embedded within Oracle HCM and is automatically generated by Oracle Data Mining to enrich dashboards and manager’s portals with predictions about the likelihood that an employee will voluntarily leave the organization and a prediction about the employee’s likely future performance.

As Oracle continues to push for the Fusion version of the Apps, it also provides flexible adaption strategies such as

Module Co-Existence: Implement an individual Oracle Fusion Application module to complement or extend the functionality of existing Oracle EBS environment.Pillar Co-Existence: Implement a suite of applications such as HCM in Fusion and run the rest in existing EBS environment.

Here is the pictorial representation of Module co-existence strategy.

As there are several blogs trumpeting Fusion capabilities, I try to limit it to a few that I haven’t seen much elsewhere.

Now on to Financials.

Fusion Accounting Hub as a Reporting Platform

How many times we’ve heard from business users about the lack of financial reporting capabilities in EBS. Well, Oracle certainly heard it all and responded with Fusion Accounting Hub’s reporting platform. Even though the product is pretty nice fit, it has to be licensed separately just as is the Financial Accounting Hub in EBS.

The Fusion Accounting Hub’s reporting platform provides real-time access to financial information with exceptional reporting and analytics capabilities to all users. Interestingly, reporting platform has its own embedded multi-dimensional data model and leverages Oracle’s own Hyperion Essbase. It is important to understand that Fusion Applications only uses cubes with ASO.

The main purpose of embedding the Essbase cube within Accounting hub’s reporting platform is twofold: First, it allows you to store large quantities of data in a way that can be accessed rapidly. Second, it allows you to manage and organize this data for fast and powerful retrieval for immediate decision support.

When the Fusion Accounting Hub is integrated with an E-Business Suite General Ledger, customers can apply a chart of accounts mapping to convert chart of accounts values to a corporate or other standardized reporting structure. In this case, the E-Business Suite General Ledger can continue to serve as the local book that is used for journal posting, period close, and other accounting processing, while Fusion General Ledger can serve as the corporate book where you perform real-time reporting and analytics throughout the accounting period.

Fusion General LedgerThe Fusion Accounting Hub leverages the Fusion General Ledger. The Fusion General Ledger combines traditional general ledger functionality with Oracle Essbase functionality, which is seamlessly embedded within the Fusion General Ledger. For example, at the time users create their chart of accounts, the Oracle Essbase cube is created. If a cost center is added or a date-effective hierarchy is modified, Fusion General Ledger automatically creates or modifies the corresponding cube hierarchy in Essbase. Then as transactions or journals are posted, Fusion General Ledger automatically updates the multi-dimensional balances to ensure that balances are always in sync and up-to-the-minute accurate. Unlike a data warehouse, no batch programs need to be run to populate the multi-dimensional balances; it is all happening in real-time whenever a journal or transaction is posted.
Fusion General Ledger also pre-aggregates balances at every possible summarization level across each dimension of the chart of accounts and accounting periods for multiple date-effective hierarchies. The result: extremely fast reports and queries. Reports and analytics can be refreshed on-the-fly without having to run a process or program because the balances have already been pre-calculated. Multi-dimensional analysis is also instantaneous. Users can quickly slice and dice data across dimensions and drill up, down, and sideways on any parent level.

Oracle Fusion Functional Setup Manager.

Oracle Fusion Functional Setup Manager is an exciting new feature in Oracle Fusion Applications that provides a single user interface for performing all tasks related to application setup. This overview provides an introduction to Oracle Fusion Functional Setup Manager and explains the concepts, benefits, and how it works for an application implementer.

• Single entry point for setting up applications

• Built-in decision tree for fine-tuning your configuration

• Easy export and import of setup data

• Pre-seeded setup templates and guided task flows

• Built-in collaboration and reporting

• Full extensibility for creating custom setup objects

• Rapid start with predefined configuration packages

Composers

This is one of my favorite fusion features. With composers Oracle let the end-users do several things at run-time, otherwise its impossible to do so with apps. Oracle Fusion applications provide content and functionality to users that enable them to complete their tasks (such as , learning about a product or service, keeping up with sales data, or submitting an order) as easily and efficiently as possible. Some key capabilities includes

•Let you change a page layout.

•Add task flows, portlets, documents, layout components, and other objects to a page.

•Provide values for the properties associated with pages and the objects they contain.

•Add a Data composer and make it available for users based on certain criteria.

•Let end users embed training materials videos to any screens and have it relay it to other users.

•Change process flow based on GUI.

•Pre-create, create dashboard reports and make it available to a group or to the entire organization.

Since you are here to read on Fusion, I try not to disappoint you with additional gobbledygook 🙂

About Sunthar TharmalingamBio: Sunthar is an Oracle Certified Professional with over 14 years of experience in multifaceted architectural design and implementation of mission-critical global Oracle Applications. He provides technical leadership to the enterprise project teams and manages the comprehensive implementation life-cycle. Sunthar has exhaustive hands-on competencies in vital Oracle technologies such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Databases, OBI Applications, Oracle Identity Management and Webcenter suites.
This Blog has been categorized according to the Oracle products that integrates with Oracle E-Business Suite. Should you wish to participate as an author for a related module or category please register as a member and mail me to let me know which category you would like to write under.